The Eternal

We Say...

Review by Michaelangelo Matos

Sonic Youth may make music that evokes industrial carnage — in part because industrial carnage helps create it — but they’ve always been professionals first. This means that once they figured out how to sound totally unlike everybody else, they used their hurtling rhythms and anything-goes guitar blend toward as many ends as they could dream up, from heavy guitar rock to splintered psychedelia to dream-state reveries to the expressway to your skull. They were always interested in pop as well as gunk and noise, and they’ve never shied away from any end of the spectrum. Of course they’re lifers — the best kind rock can have.

The Eternal, their first album for an indie in 21 years (not counting 1989’s Whitey Album, recorded as Ciccone Youth), is the kind you can only hope for a favorite band to record near after nearly three decades in business. Certain things are automatic now for sure: Steve Shelley’s drums and Mark Ibold’s bass take tempo turns with a fluidity he and Kim Gordon (who plays guitar alongside Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo) used to deliberately avoid, just to give the music even more screech.

Screech hasn’t been the point in a long time, though, which doesn’t mean there aren’t moments of it on The Eternal, or that they aren’t thrilling. Take the hair-raising outro of “Antenna,” which sounds like someone’s strings are being drummed on with a stick. Just a few seconds long, but it caps the song perfectly. “Calming the Snake” spreads a solo out from a single keening note, like a telephone wire fritzing out in slow motion.

Sonic Youth have spent most of the ’00s fairly riff-happy; since 2002’s Murray Street their albums have been as hooky as the grunge-era rock-radio move Dirty (1992), only a lot less self-consciously so. A lot of The Eternal leads off with dynamic, insistent guitar parts: the serrated central lick of “Poison Arrow,” or the loose-wristed rhythmic motif that drives “No Way,” or the almost boogie-ish lead of “Walkin’ Blue.”

The band is mortal. Neither Moore nor Ranaldo’s voices are as reliable as they used to be (Gordon less so), some of the songwriting is flat (“Walkin’ Blue” is not Ranaldo’s finest lyrical moment), and inevitably with a band of this sort of history, there can be the sense that you’ve heard it before, even on something as perfectly executed as like the pointy-noted rave-up that surges through “Anti-Orgasm” before a drum break and raging-storm-clouds guitar move in. But all this time later, nobody does Sonic Youth like Sonic Youth.